OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed growing concerns about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence during a recent appearance at an event hosted by The Indian Express in India. Speaking at a major AI summit, Altman pushed back against what he described as exaggerated claims about AI’s water and energy consumption. He dismissed widespread online assertions that using ChatGPT consumes vast amounts of water, calling them “totally fake.” Altman explained that while older data centers did use evaporative cooling—which required significant water—modern facilities no longer rely on that method. “Now that we don’t do that, you see these things on the internet where, ‘Don’t use ChatGPT, it’s 17 gallons of water for each query’ or whatever,” he said. “This is completely untrue, totally insane, no connection to reality.” While he downplayed water concerns, Altman acknowledged that overall energy consumption by AI systems is a legitimate issue—especially as global AI usage continues to surge. He stressed that the real concern isn’t per-query energy use, but the cumulative energy demand driven by widespread adoption. To address this, he emphasized the urgent need to scale up clean energy sources like nuclear, wind, and solar power. There is currently no legal requirement for tech companies to report their energy or water usage, making independent research essential. Meanwhile, data centers have been linked to rising electricity costs in various regions. When asked about a widely circulated claim that a single ChatGPT query uses the equivalent of 1.5 iPhone battery charges, Altman firmly rejected it. “There’s no way it’s anything close to that much,” he said. He also criticized the way energy debates are framed, particularly the comparison between the energy required to train an AI model versus the energy needed for a human to perform a task. “But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman pointed out. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.” In his view, the fair comparison is between the energy it takes for an AI to answer a question after being trained and the energy a human uses to do the same. “And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way,” he said. The full interview, where the discussion on water and energy begins around the 26:35 mark, is available for viewing.